Such terrifying dogs have
not been seen since the Hound of the Baskervilles.

They have been bred by an
ardent admirer of the late “Rabbi” Meir Kahane, who was branded by the Israeli
Supreme Court as a fascist. Their task is to protect the settlements and attack
Palestinians. They are settler-dogs, or, rather, dog-settlers.

All our TV stations have
reported on them at length and lauded their effectiveness and ardor.

All in preparation for
“September”.

SEPTEMBER IS not just the
name of a month, the seventh in the old Roman calendar. It is the symbol of a
terrible danger, an unspeakable existential menace.

In the next few weeks,
the Palestinians will ask the UN to recognize the State of Palestine. They have
already mustered a large majority in the General Assembly. After that, according
to the official assessment of our army, all hell will break loose. Multitudes of
Palestinians will rise, attack the “Separation” Wall, storm the settlements,
confront the army, create chaos.

“The Palestinian
Authority is planning a bloodbath,” Avigdor Lieberman cheerfully asserted. And
when Lieberman predicts violence, it would be unwise to ignore him.

For months now, our army
has been preparing for just such an eventuality. This week it announced that it
is training the settlers, too, and telling them exactly when they are allowed to
shoot to kill. Thus it confirms what we all know: that there is no clear
distinction between the army and the settlers – many settlers are officers in
the army, and many officers live in settlements. “The army defends all Israelis,
wherever they are,” is the official line.

One of the scenarios the
army is preparing for, it was stated, is for Palestinians shooting at soldiers
and settlers “from inside the mass demonstrations”. That is an ominous
statement. I have been at hundreds of demonstrations and never witnessed anyone
shooting “from inside the demonstration”. Such a person would have to be
insanely irresponsible, since he would expose all the people around him to
deadly retaliation. But it is a handy pretext for shooting at non-violent
protesters.

It sounds so ominous,
because it has happened already in the past. After the first intifada,
which was considered a Palestinian success story (and brought about the
Oslo
agreement), our army diligently prepared for the second one. The chosen
instruments were sharpshooters.

The second (“al-Aqsa”)
intifada started after the breakdown of the 2000 Camp David conference and
Ariel Sharon’s deliberately provocative “visit”
to the TempleMount. The Palestinians
held non-violent mass demonstrations. The army responded with selective
killings. A sharpshooter accompanied by an officer would take position in the
path of the protest, and the officer would point out selected targets –
protesters who looked like “ringleaders”. They were killed.

This was highly
effective. Soon the non-violent demonstrations ceased and were replaced by very
violent (“terrorist”) actions. With those the army was back on familiar ground.

All in all, during the
second intifada 4546 Palestinians were killed, of whom 882 were children,
as against 1044 Israelis, 716 of them civilians, including 124 children.

I am afraid that the
preparations for the third intifada, which is anticipated to start next
month, are proceeding on the same lines. But the circumstances would be quite
different. After the events in Egypt and Syria, Palestinian protesters may
react differently this time, and the “bloodbath” may be much more severe. So
will international and Arab reactions. I imagine posters condemning Binyamin
al-Assad and Bashar Netanyahu.

But most Israelis are not
worried. They believe that the entire scenario has been invented by Netanyahu as
a trick to end the huge social protest movement that is rocking
Israel. “The young protesters demand Social
Justice and a Welfare State, like children demanding ice cream while disaster is
lurking around the corner,” as one of the colonels (ret.) put it.

THE SETTLERS and their
dogs loom large in the upcoming scenarios.

That is quite logical,
since the settlers now play a pivotal role in the conflict. It is they who
prevent any peace agreement, or even meaningful peace negotiations.

It is quite simple: any
peace between Israel
and the Palestinian people will necessarily be based on ceding the West Bank,
East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip to the future
State of Palestine.
A world-wide consensus on this is now in place. The only question is where
exactly the border will run, since there is also a consensus about minor
mutually agreed swaps of territory.

This means that peace
would necessarily entail the removal of a large number of settlements and the
evacuation of the settlers throughout the West Bank.

The Settlers and their
allies dominate the present Israeli government coalition. They object to giving
up even one square inch of occupied territory of the country God has promised
us. (Even settlers who do not believe in God do believe that God has promised us
the land.) Because of this, there are no peace negotiations, no freeze on
building activities in the settlements, no move of any kind towards peace.

The settlers went to
their locations in the West Bank
specifically for this purpose: to create “facts on the ground” that would
prevent any possibility of the establishment of a viable Palestinian state.
Therefore it is quite immaterial whether it is the settlers who prevent the
return of the occupied territories for peace, or whether the government uses the
settlers for this purpose. It comes to the same: the settlers block any peace
effort.

As the Americans would
put it: It’s the settlers, stupid.

SOME NICE Israelis are
indeed playing stupid, or really are.

It is now the fashion in
certain circles to “embrace” the settlers in the name of national unity. Jews
should not quarrel among themselves, they say, drawing on ancient Ghetto wisdom.
Settlers are people like us.

Prominent among those who
say so is Shelly Yachimovitch, a member of the Knesset and one of six candidates
for the chair(wo)manship of the moribund Labor Party. For years she has done a
good job as an advocate of social justice, never wasting a word on peace,
occupation, settlements, Palestine
and such trifles. Now, as part of her campaign, she has come all out for loving
the settlers. As she put it: “I certainly do not see the settlement enterprise
as a sin and crime. At the time, it was completely consensual. It was the Labor
Party which promoted the settlement in the territories. That is a fact, a
historical fact. “

Some believe that
Yachimovitch is only pretending to feel this way, in order to garner mainstream
votes for a takeover of the party, and that she intendsto merge what remains of the party with Kadima, where she would try to
displace Tzipi Livni and perhaps even become Prime Minister.

Perhaps. But I have a
lurking suspicion that she really believes what she is saying – and that is an
awful thing to say about any politician, male or female, of course.

BUT SERIOUSLY, there is
no way to embrace the settlers and fight for social justice at the same time. It
just can’t be done, even though some of the leaders of the social protest
movement advocate this on tactical grounds.

There can be no Israeli
welfare state while the war goes on. The border incidents of the last two weeks
show how easy it is to divert public opinion and silence the protests when the
banner of security is unfurled. And how easy it is for the government to prolong
any incident.

Sowing the fear of
“September” is yet another example.

But the reasons for the
impossibility of separating social justice from security go deeper. Serious
social reforms need money, lots of money. Even after reforming the tax system –
more “progressive” direct taxes, less “regressive” indirect taxes – and breaking
the cartels of the “tycoons”, tens of billion of dollars will be needed to
rescue our schools, our hospitals and our social services.

These billions can only
come from the military budget and the settlements. Huge sums are invested in the
settlements – not just in heavily subsidized housing for the settlers,
government salaries for many settlers (a far higher percentage that in the
general population), but also for the infrastructure (roads, electricity and
water supply etc.) and the large number of troops needed to defend them. The
preparations for “September” show again how much this costs.

BUT EVEN this is not the
full story. Beyond all these facts there is the main reason for the deformation
of Israel:
the conflict itself.

Because of the conflict,
we are obliged to keep a huge military establishment. We pay for the armed
forces, per capita, far more than the citizens of any Western country. Israel, a
country of a mere 7.5 million people, maintains the fourth or fifth largest
military establishment in the world. US military aid
pays for only a small part of this.

Therefore, putting an end
to the war is a necessary precondition for any real effort to turn
Israel
into a “Scandinavian” welfare state, with a maximum of social justice. The
conflict is not just one item among many that must be considered. It is the main
item.

You can love the settlers
or hate them, oppose them or embrace them as much as you like – the fact remains
that the settlements are by far the main obstacle to peace and the welfare
state. Not just because of their cost, not just because of the pogroms their
inhabitants carry out from time to time, not just because of the way they
dominate the political system. But because of their very existence.

Unlike the hound of the
Baskervilles, the dogs of the settlements are barking loudly. It is the sound of
war.